ool, rather as a great decorator than a great
painter. With all his skill and charm, that is to say, there is not one
of his canvases that we could place beside a picture by Watteau on
anything like equal terms. Superficially it may be equally or possibly
more attractive, but inwardly there is no comparison. Let us hear what
Sir Joshua Reynolds has to say of him:--

"Our neighbours, the French, are much in this practice of extempore
invention, and their dexterity is such as even to excite admiration, if
not envy; but how rarely can this praise be given to their finished
pictures! The late Director of their Academy, Boucher, was eminent in
this way. When I visited him some years since in France, I found him at
work on a very large picture without drawings or models of any kind. On
my remarking this particular circumstance, he said, when he was young,
studying his art, he found it necessary to use models, but he had left
them off for many years.... However, in justice, I cannot quit this
painter without adding that in the former part of his life, when he was
in the habit of having recourse to nature, he was not without a
considerable degree of merit--enough to make half the painters of his
country his imitators: he had often grace and beauty, and good skill in
composition, but I think all under the influence of a bad taste; his
imitators are, indeed, abominable."

Twenty-one years elapsed between the birth of Boucher and the next
painter of anything like his ability, namely, JEAN BAPTISTE GREUZE. He
was a native of Tournous, near Macon, and lived to see the century out,
dying in 1805, at the age of seventy-eight. His popularity is nowadays
due chiefly to his heads of young girls, which he painted in his later
life with admirable skill, but with a sentimentality that almost repels.
The famous example in the National Gallery is more free from the sickly
sweetness that spoils most of them, and reminds us that he could paint
more serious works, and paint them exceedingly well. He first came into
notice by pictures like _La Lecture du Bible_, _La Malediction
Paternelle_, or _Le Fils Puni_, which are now to be seen--though
generally passed by--at the Louvre, and his style was imitated in later
years in England by Wheatley and others of that school with more or less
success. It was a great blow to him, and one which seriously affected
his career when the Academy censured his Diploma picture, _The Emperor
Severus reproaching Car